Act-On marketing automation review my personal journey

Act-On is a SAAS marketing automation platform. It provides small, medium and enterprise level businesses with the necessary tools to generate, nurture and score leads. The system has become synonymous with ease of use, which is why it has gained such traction with B2B marketing teams.

My journey with Act-On began a little under a year ago. It seems like a lot more than that. Which is likely due to the amount I have learned and the skills I’ve developed.

Nonetheless, it seems to be a never ending process of discovery. Recently I became a Certified Act-On user and I am proud of that achievement. New features and deeper understanding of the system keep us on our toes. The Act-On certified SPOTONVISION team leverages these developments to provide the most relevant marketing practices to our clients.

If you’re looking to learn more about marketing automation in general. I suggest reading this insightful piece by my commander in chief: Mr. Shimon Ben Ayoun: Boost B2B buyer engagement with marketing automation.

How does Act-On compare?

Act-On sits as one of the leaders in G2 crowd’s system comparison board. They are highly rated overall and have substantial market presence. Giving them an overall score 4.3 out of 5 stars.

Usually, these figures tend be rather superficial but they do show that Act-On remains a key player in the marketing automation market place.

Most recently, the company has announced some fundamental updates to the product. New ways in which it handles forms as well as some major developments in reporting capabilities. We are also getting access to new features such as predictive emails, the university and engagement insights.

We thought it would be a good idea to tackle some of the features. Also, to explain why Act-On has become one of our most revered marketing automation systems here at spotONvision.

What we like most about Act-On?

• Multi-faceted: Act-On is a multi-faceted tool. It provides users with contact management capabilities, as well as all the tools necessary for an organisation to achieve their sales and marketing goals.
• Ease of integration with CRM systems such as, Salesforce and SugarCRM make lead scoring, progressive profiling and revenue attribution relatively painless.
• Real time insights: The website prospector can provide real time insights into site activity across multiple domains. Coupled with Google Analytics, we have a powerful instrument which can be leveraged to inform our marketing decisions.
• Customer support: One of the best parts of being an Act-On partner is support. We are often confronted with very particular problems specific to one of our customers. As each client has different needs and uses the software slightly differently, we can’t always know it all. When we do get stumped and require some help, the support team have always been great at helping us solve our problems, ensuring customer satisfaction.
• User Community: Act-On also recently announced the launch of a beta “community”. This is a feature that a smorgasbord of marketing automation tools offer. It is certainly good to see that Act-On are also going to take advantage of their user base to fill potential knowledge gaps.

What we like least?

The only major reservation that I have about Act-On is the reporting capabilities. Since beginning to use the system, it became very clear that the reporting procedure was going to be a limitation. Even when given access to the Enterprise Data Studio, the amount of work necessary to pull insights was huge.

Although, individual form and email reporting was available. The ability to combine assets under one campaign was a difficult endeavor.

What we needed was to find a way of associating all forms and emails to specific campaign names. Using the data studio, we were able to extract behavioral data. This allowed us to combine the assets and gain an idea of overall form and email activity associated to individual campaigns.

Unfortunately, this was not enough. Thus, we are still actively developing a standardised approach to reporting on campaign activity. Until that time however, we are pleased to see that Act-on is making efforts to close this reporting gap with the innovative engagement insights feature.

Do you want to learn more about Act-On and what it could mean for your organization? Please contact us at [email protected] or via +31 (0)20 705 58 88.